The invention is in the field of computer-aided design (CAD) systems, and specifically relates to a system and method for simulating woven fabric surface detail with emphasis on realistic thread interlacing and color blending. Immediate applications of the present invention are apparel and textile design industries.
Preparation of fabric sample swatches costs millions of dollars for the textile mills and thousands of man hours in the design studio annually. Because of the tremendous amount of time involved, mills and designers are forced to work on fashion styles and trends at least a year in advance in order to cope with the time-consuming process of sample swatch preparation. From the mills' standpoint, the sample swatch operation intervenes the normal production schedule, increases machine down-time, and wastes human and natural resources. From the designer's standpoint, it delays response to the market changes, causes uncertainty in forecasting future styles and fashion trends, and wastes valuable human creativity. The present invention addresses all of the above problems.
In the field of computer-aided design, one of the objectives of any CAD system is to realistically simulate an image of an object, including color, shape, and construction, on a graphic visual input/output device, such as a cathode ray terminal (CRT). In case of woven fabric, surface detail modeling to capture the intricacies of thread interlacing and multiple shades of color threads are not possible to achieve through the practice of traditional symbolic representation of weaves. Because threads are actually represented by solid color blocks in known prior art systems, the interlacings between warp ends and filling picks are painted according to the format of grid paper, where the grids marked by an "X" are painted with the color of warp ends and the blank grids are painted with the color of filling picks.
In a real situation, however, threads are shaded by various light sources. The spinning of fibers also creates shaded visual appearance. In addition, the interlacing between warp ends and filling picks produces shading variation. Therefore, all the shades generated by various factors as mentioned above, must be seriously taken into consideration when two sets of warp and filling threads are interlaced together in order to obtain a realistic woven fabric surface detail. A graphic, instead of symbolic, approach provides all the possibilities to address the problems mentioned, since graphic representation of woven fabric physically simulates each individual thread going up and down over one another in the fabric surface. The ability to design and construct yarns used in such a woven fabric is also crucial to obtaining a realistic image of a woven fabric on the traffic visual input/Output device. Designing and constructing multi-color threads require the twisting of pre-dyed fibers of different colors in order to achieve the visual appearance of color randomness. The symbolic designing of woven fabric, as a matter of fact, over-simplifies the complexity of surface detail. Moreover, the lack of ability to design and construct multi-color threads makes it beyond the reach of symbolic approaches to achieve the realism of woven fabric on the graphic visual input/output device of a CAD system. Those are the problems the present invention addresses.